Editorial Article

Ben Gurion
University - Oren Yiftachel (Dept. of Geography) makes his bed
with the Hamas

By Alon Ben Shaul
6.2.2009

The Jailed Academic

Beer-Sheba was hit by dozens of long range
missile during the last military operation in Gaza, but its
university is harboring some lectures that fully identify themselves
with Hamas. One of them sees nothing wrong in the enemy's behavior
and puts it down to a legitimate resistance akin to a mere prison
rebellion. Iran can certainly say that it has an ambassador in Ben
Gurion University.

Oren Yiftachel, of Ben Gurion University,
like many Israeli Leftists, is in love with metaphors. It gives him
the opportunity to compare Israel to the Apartheid regime that ruled
South Africa until two decades ago. It also provides him with a
perfect excuse to equate today's Israel to the old European
colonialist powers that "used mass incarceration of indigenous
groups…" Additionally, it helps to enhance his imagination, by
making parallels between Israel and Chechnya, Kosovo, Kashmir,
Darfur and the Tamil area of Sri Lanka. In short, Israel, like the
oppressive regimes in these regions is a racist country, trying to
get rid of unwanted populations by "applying methods of spatial
containment and violent punishment".

And what inspired the geography scholar of
Beer-Sheba University to write all this? The IDF's operation in
Gaza. Not that he needed the operation to consolidate his views on
the conflict, but it was yet another proof of what he sees as a
policy of locking up the entire Palestinian population into a small
designated strip. And true to tradition, like many of his fellow
leftists in his campus he goes back to 1948. "Gaza", he wrote in the
poisonous anti-Israeli Australian website newmatilda.com, has turned
then "into an open-air jail "when over 150,000 Palestinian refugees
were driven by Israel into the small region, joining its 60,000
previous residents. The refugees were never allowed to return to
their lands and homes which were confiscated and destroyed".
Yiftachel did not miss the irony of the "peace process" of the early
90's during which "the incarceration of Gaza intensified with a
sequence of closures, movement restrictions and the construction in
1944 of a massive barrier around the strip".

Terrorism? The writer does trouble himself
to admit that the shelling of Israeli civilians and suicide bombing
of previous years were clear acts of terror. However, these very
acts "gave legitimacy within Israeli society to carry out the
incarceration policy". And his conclusion? The violence should also
be perceived as a prison uprising, currently suppressed with terror
by the Israeli state. In other words, Israel was the one to blame
for making the Palestinians violent, but in fact, it is not violence
as such, but a justified inevitable way to resist the oppressor. In
that he is very much into his elements. It is not that the
restrictions were imposed on the Gazans because they were violent.
The restrictions made them rebel, as much as the barrier outraged
them and pushed them into taking up arms. In his frame of mind the
outcome was the reason, and the reason was the outcome.

Yiftachel's argument evolves around his
favorite theme - Gaza is a prison and Israel is the jailer. For
re-enforcing his thesis he will go to any length which includes fact
bending, sins of omission, political prejudice, outright bias,
historic inaccuracies and sheer ignorance.

In fact, in his line of thought, Israel
would have liked to get rid of the Palestinian population all
together, by applying methods of ethnic cleansing. Such an option
was not possible because it has become "too embarrassing or
unpopular". Instead, "much to the regret of racist regimes", it
resorts to the other policy, that is of mass incarceration, "one of
the main policy options left for colonial states aiming to dominate
indigenous populations".

The author of this article would not refer
to the Israeli decision to pull out of Gaza and if he does, he hints
that the regimes in question "lost some of its ability to settle and
control the land by other, softer, means..." In his twisted mind, he
reaches the conclusion that if Israel had the choice, it would have
rid itself of the local population in Gaza long ago. Since it can
not do it any longer under the watchful eyes of the international
community, it minimized its oppressive measures and instead of
committing genocide, it turned Gaza into the biggest prison on
earth.

Yiftachel made a career out of advancing the
idea that Israel is championing a "creeping Apartheid" against the
Bedouin population of the Negev district. His article made it clear
that he opposes the idea of Israel's existence as a Jewish state, by
lamenting the fact that the Palestinian refugees were not allowed
back in 1948. "Since its establishment", he keeps writing, "Israel's
ethnocratic regime has worked incessantly to Judaise the country by
confiscating Palestinian lands…". Such a policy continued during
the "Oslo process". Israel fenced off the Bedouins, the Gazans, the
West Bankers and until 1966, the Green Line Arabs. Israel is setting
an industry of creating "prisons within prisons".

Abu Mazen? – Just a collaborator

It would be over demanding to expect this
professor of Geography to exercise some integrity. No wonder he
refrains from stating facts that can turn his arguments ups and
downs. He does not, for instance, mention the fact that until Gaza
turned into Hamastan, ten of thousands of Arabs were allowed to work
inside Israel. Nor does he bother to remind us that until the era of
suicide bombings, there were no borders between Israel and the
territories and every Palestinian could have come and go as he
pleased.

But Yiftachel, without any equivocations,
identified himself with Hamas and its endgame aims. He justified
Hamas leadership’s rejection of never accepting the "Oslo illusion"
or the promise of "two states for two people" enshrined in the
"roadmap" or the "Annapolis process". He does not hesitate to put
himself in Hamas' shoes and blindly parrot the rants of this Iran's
proxy. "They have realized", he argues, "that the promise has become
an empty rhetoric which enables the ongoing colonization of their
lands". And there is an economic reason behind it all. The Jews are
profiting from their incarceration policy since it is part of a
system of "protecting economic privileges". To put boldly, the
Israelis place the Palestinians behind bars and in the process they
are making money.

But the punch line of the professor is yet
to come. He points out at the fact that the recent operation in Gaza
has been launched and backed by two outgoing Governments in
Jerusalem and Washington against a "democratically elected
Government". Here Yiftachel excels himself by arguing that Israel
and the USA had no legitimacy to attack Hamas because their
administrations were at their "dying days", while the regime in Gaza
enjoys popular and legal acceptability. And what does the world do,
he cried out, "…it imposed sanctions on the Hamas Government", and
by doing so it "punished the occupied twice: once by the brutal
occupation and a second time for attempting to resist".

The lecturer from Ben-Gurion University does
not stop here in throwing himself at Hamas' feet. He denounces Abu
Mazen as a collaborator with the Israeli regime against the true
Palestinian resisters. In that jail he sees the rebellion erupting,
but the colonial prison authorities would always find the ultimate
traitors amongst the prisoners in order to quell the rebellion. That
is the regime in the West Bank that helps the oppressor to maintain
its incarceration, while the true leaders of their people are likely
to be "oppressed and often eliminated".

To conclude, Yiftachel advises us to read
the poetry of Mahmoud Drawish, but he warns us that jailing of the
other side can not give us security, as we live now "on borrowed
time".

Yiftachel certainly proves that he is still
jailed in his own concepts.

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